9.16 Thwarting Email Spam

In these last days of the Usenet, commercial vultures are hanging about
and grepping through news like crazy to find email addresses they can
foist off their scams and products to. As a reaction to this, many
people have started putting nonsense addresses into their From
lines. I think this is counterproductive—it makes it difficult for
people to send you legitimate mail in response to things you write, as
well as making it difficult to see who wrote what. This rewriting may
perhaps be a bigger menace than the unsolicited commercial email itself
in the end.

The biggest problem I have with email spam is that it comes in under
false pretenses. I press g and Gnus merrily informs me that I
have 10 new emails. I say “Golly gee! Happy is me!” and select the
mail group, only to find two pyramid schemes, seven advertisements
(“New! Miracle tonic for growing full, lustrous hair on your toes!”)
and one mail asking me to repent and find some god.